Daughter’s Tribute to Mom Benazir Bhutto

It can be a traumatic experience for any teenager to live without a mother snatched away in a brutal manner. A year after Pakistan’s charismatic leader Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, her 18-year-old daughter Bakhtawar has expressed her anguish through a moving song that is being broadcast on the State-run television.

“Like any child who has lost a parent, it was only natural that Benazir Bhutto’s eldest daughter would wish to express her grief for her murdered mother. Less obvious, perhaps, was that the tribute would come in the form of a mournful rap song,” reports The Independent as quoted in the Huffington Post.

” ‘You have beauty and intelligence, everything you did have relevance,’ sings Bakhtawar, with a borrowed Brooklyn accent, over looping beats. ‘Shot in the back of your ear, so young in 54th year, murdered with three kids left behind, a hopeless nation without you, you are in all their hearts.’

“The teenager, a student at Edinburgh University, then repeats a chorus line, from which the song takes it name: ‘I would take the pain away.’

“The song, which has also been posted on YouTube, features a five-minute video of photographs and clips of the murdered former premier, including footage from the election rally at the Liaquat Bagh park in Rawalpindi which she had addressed just moments before an assassin launched a lethal gun and bomb attack on 27 December, 2007.” More here…

Pakistan’s Information Minister Ms Sherry Rehman, for years an aide to Bhutto, said Bakhtawar, a student at Britain’s Edinburgh University, wrote the lyrics and music. “It’s a tribute of a grieving daughter to her iconic and loving mother,” Rehman told Reuters on Monday. More here…